Seated on the green corduroy sofa at the coffee table in front of the turf fire, framed by its veined Connemara marble mantelpiece and Mexican finials, Dad sketched on white notepads in pencil and Magic Marker, his back to the great wealth of achievement on the bookshelves, which inspired and interested him. A high level of accomplishment was like fuel. He’d ask a question to command my attention, scanning me as his hand began to trace my likeness.
I would try not to appear too self-conscious or overly self-critical when I saw the sketch. He spoke about painting as if he’d missed his true calling. I’m sure that he could have been a great painter if he had pursued it as a vocation and committed himself to that discipline. But painting is isolating, and Dad was a social creature; he liked to have people around him, working with him, listening to him, and keeping him company.
Often, when we were up at the Big House for lunch, Dad would beam when Lizzie walked into the dining room. “Isn’t Lizzie beautiful!” he would exclaim. And Lizzie would blush. After lunch, Dad might recruit someone to pose for him up at the loft. One holiday he asked Lizzie if he could paint her portrait, but later down at the Little House, I begged her to say no. I did not want Dad to focus any more attention on her. The following morning I took her over to his studio and showed her his paintings. Along with several still lifes and a portrait of Tony with the ubiquitous hawk and his young friend John Morris in deep ocher and brown oils, there was a scattering of pictures of Dad’s girlfriends, from Min Hogg to Valeria Alberti, and a playful nude of Betts eating an apple. “I understand,” Lizzie said. “I won’t do it.”
We were all in the study late one summer afternoon. Dad was drawing, the light was dim and fading. Margaret came into the room to lay the turf for the fire, then moved to turn on the lamps. Dad held up his hand as if to stop time. “Hold on, honey, for a few moments,” he said. Our features softened as the color deserted the room, and outside the sun set beyond the riverbanks.
• • •
In June 1963, Freud was screened at the Berlin film festival. I went to the premiere with Dad. Mum had found a sweet Victorian cotton dress for me to wear, with white gloves and a blue satin ribbon for my hair. The editorial cartoonist Bill Mauldin, a friend of Dad’s from the war, joined us. They had an easy camaraderie. They had decided to go to East Berlin and to take me with them. A friend of Bill’s was living there, someone who had worked for the resistance during the war.
As we drove up to the checkpoint, a little kiosk on the far side of a bridge separated East from West. This was Checkpoint Charlie. We saw plaques and bouquets of flowers and handwritten notes commemorating the dead. Russian soldiers were goose-stepping on the eastern side, which would have been funny were they not so deadly serious. I was troubled by it, but I felt safe with my father and Bill. Some officials took our passports and disappeared for what seemed like a long time, then returned them to us, stamped some papers, and issued visas for the day. As soon as we crossed the border, the lights and commerce of the West were cast off like a party dress, revealing the gray bones of the East. Platforms stood high along the length of the wall; our driver said they had been put up so that people could stand on them and wave to their loved ones across the border. It seemed even worse, somehow, that this terrible compromise had been reached. Maybe we saw a woman with a dark babushka on her head, riding a bicycle, but otherwise no activity at all.
We drove the length of the wall, stopping a few times to climb the lookout posts to see low lines of barbed wire stretching to the other side. It felt barbaric. We went to Bill’s friend’s bar for lunch. It was a short drive to the inner city, all gray streets with no people. When the friend saw Bill, he wept. They held each other for a long time, and then the friend sat down with us and smoked a cigarette as Bill and Dad drank schnapps.
Dad wanted to go to a museum to see the head of Nefertiti. Except for a few guards, we seemed to be all alone in the place, so dank and gloomy, until we came upon this rarest and most delicate artifact—the most beautiful and legendary of all women, a perfect little bust, smaller than life-size, glowing in that tomb in East Berlin. It was like a little hint of hope.
• • •
I was excited because Lizzie and Joan were coming to St. Clerans in July. Some days later, the two of them were giggling in the guest room that Joan was occupying down the hall; they seemed to prefer each other’s company to mine. Suddenly, I felt something sharp in my nose, a jab like broken glass. I jumped off my bed and ran into the bathroom. As I watched in the mirror, a feeble wasp backed out of my nostril and buzzed off lazily around the sink. I was starting to panic. I called out that I had been stung up the nose. I was having trouble breathing. The girls shrugged—no one quite believed me. Mum wasn’t there, which compounded my feelings of self-pity. I sobbed loudly. Finally, to appease me, Betts summoned the doctor from Loughrea. A half hour of hysteria later and they were all looking on with doubtful expressions as Dr. O’Dwyer peered up my nose with a flashlight. He wielded tweezers and pulled out a stinger, saying, “Jaysus, she’s right!” Everyone gasped.
Later that holiday, Mum came to St. Clerans to reclaim some objects and furniture. Lizzie had just been staying with her parents at Glenveagh Castle, in Co. Donegal, the home of Henry McIlhenny, and the guests had dressed up as the four seasons at dinner one evening. She suggested we do this at St. Clerans. I remember our coming together in the upstairs Red Sitting Room. The girls in costume: Lizzie was Spring, in pale chiffon and jade beads, and I was Summer, in a blue bathing suit with sweet peas from the garden sewn all over it and a crown of overblown roses. Joan, in her favorite brown kimono and a hat of berries and thorns, was Autumn. And in layers of white and gray tulle, with painted red dots at the corner of her eyes, the tip of her nose a delicate blue, Mum was playing Winter.
• • •
Dad was making The List of Adrian Messenger at Bray, on the outskirts of Dublin. He had decided to become an Irish citizen. Tony and I had followed suit, but because I was under thirteen, I did not have to renounce my American citizenship. This decision on my father’s part may also have saved Tony from being drafted for the Vietnam War, which was already voraciously consuming the youth of America. Dad had decided to cast Tony as the son of Dana Wynter in the movie, a part that required a child who could ride.
During this time, my father had laid down, along with the director John Boorman, the outline for an Irish Film Board. Dad’s idea and intention was to work in Ireland as much as possible, drawing outside talent with the lure of tax breaks for artists. From this moment, many of Dad’s films, through The Kremlin Letter and Casino Royale, always included some scenes to be shot in Ireland.
Lizzie and I were staying at a boardinghouse on the outskirts of Rathfarnham, learning to be proficient horsewomen nearby at Colonel Dudgeon’s riding establishment. Only on special occasions did we see the colonel. He was delicate and kind, a great rider with the straight spine of an officer. We would watch his protégée, Penny Morton, a beautiful blond Olympic equestrienne who happened to be stone deaf, sidesaddle on her bay stallion, kicking up the turf as he flew into an extended trot, practicing their dressage in the vast indoor arena.
Mum visited and decided to take riding lessons. I remember an instructor called Major McNamara, brutal, Scottish, straight out of the Queen’s Army, screaming at her, “You look like a bag of balloons. Straighten up!” And my poor mother, jogging around, with the cap on the back of her head, red in the face.
Lizzie and I went up to Powerscourt House to see Dad and Tony on set. Tony was perched high on an outrageously good-looking gray horse—its name in the movie was Avatar. He was wearing the black velvet cap and red coat of a whip-in, a full white stock and gold fox pin, white breeches, and high black boots with a tan leather turnover and spurs. He carried a loose hunting crop, which he dangled and snapped around my head a few times.
After The List of Adrian Messenger, Dad was offered the part of the mentor to the conflicted priest, Tom Tryon, in The Cardinal
. He proclaimed it was all for a lark, but I think he got a good paycheck, and he certainly enjoyed the costumes. Again, Dad disappeared for many months to make Night of the Iguana in Mexico with Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Deborah Kerr, and a young ingénue called Sue Lyon. Liz Taylor was out there too, with Burton, in a village the crew had carved out of the jungle—a place close to the sleepy fishing village of Puerto Vallarta, called Mismaloya.
A story was published that Dad had thrown a big party welcoming the actors to the set and had presented a gold-plated derringer to each of them with five bullets apiece to be used on one another should the going get fierce. From all accounts, there were the usual attractions to making a John Huston film—attractive people, a jungle location, storms, guns, wild animals, insects, and a good deal of tequila. Mum remarked that Dad never looked well when he returned from Mexico.
CHAPTER 10
Anjelica with Allegra in the garden at Maida Avenue, 1965
Away from Ireland, from the green fields and the open air, 31 Maida Avenue, a graceful cream-colored Georgian town house on a quiet street in Little Venice, became the center of our new way of life in London. It looked onto the Regents Canal, an estuary that flows from the East End to the heart of nearby Paddington. Houseboats were moored on either side, and in summer the light filtered through the leaves of the plane trees lining the pavement above its banks.
There were steps leading up to the front door, which Mum had chosen to paint a muddy green to reflect the water. The house, like all of Mum’s creations, was beautiful. There was a large basement kitchen with flagstone floors and unvarnished pine cabinets that looked out onto an overgrown garden, at the far end of which was a wrought-iron four-poster bed, where we lounged after long Sunday lunches, when friends would come to eat or stop by after other dates, for drinks and dancing.
The living room at Maida Avenue was painted, in Mum’s words, “Irish-sky gray.” She had applied the color with rags, so the effect was uneven and cloudy. The wall that separated the living and dining room on the first floor had been removed, and the light came streaming through tall windows on both sides. Against the far wall, between the windows, the philosopher Rousseau’s daybed, framed by the curving necks of two red swans with golden beaks, had made the passage from Ireland alongside the figure of a bronze Shiva. Anemones in apothecary vials were clustered on top of a piano. A Regency chaise stood on clawed feet.
Mum’s bedroom was next to mine, off the upper landing, overlooking the canal. She had hung a turquoise Navajo chieftain’s necklace that Dad had given her after The Misfits on a wall the color of blackberry fool, a British dessert, above an Egyptian revival bed. Her bathroom was lined in antique mirror she’d found at junk stores and had recut, and she had commissioned Maro, the daughter of Arshile Gorky and Magouche Phillips, to paint an angel on her bathtub. Maro was going out with Lizzie’s brother, Matthew.
My room had pale salmon walls and carpet the color of burnt orange, with a huge oval mirror, gold and garlanded, with candelabra on either side. Mum and I found it together, antiquing in Burford, on a trip to Oxfordshire. A dressmaker’s cabinet stood opposite, its shelves and drawers crammed with my antique bead-and-ribbon collection, my treasures from the Portobello Road and Antiquarius, and the ever popular hand-me-downs from Joan and Lizzie, who was kindly providing me use of her brassieres, as Mum said I didn’t need them yet. My bed was by the window overlooking the garden, with a Chinese flag we had converted into a bedspread—tongues of flame embroidered on a midnight-blue silk background. My bathroom had a fireplace. I used to lock the door, draw the bath, light the fire, and read Marjorie Proops’s Problem Page in Woman magazine.
Mum called me her “Sweetie Patootie.” I called her “Mug.” I loved our alliance, our sweet conspiracy. Dabbing on her perfume and sinking my finger into the glass pot with the foamy white cream called Crème de Bonne Femme; watching her stroke dark blue mascara onto her eyelashes with a little brush and making a moue when she painted her mouth with lipstick. I watched her get ready in the evenings, her reflection in the mirror, surrounded by lightbulbs, witnessing the transition from all that I knew and recognized to something that took my breath away. She had bought a dress from Madame Grès for the season. It was mauve taffeta, strapless, like a column. She wore it with the turquoise necklace. The effect was astonishing. I would forget that the eventuality was that she would leave to go out. I understood that Mum had an enormous capacity for love and was conscious of her responsibility to the many people in her life who looked to her for guidance. I was envious, not of them exactly, but of the amount of attention she paid them. She had seen my eyes open for the first time; she was the witness to my first breath. I knew she loved me most of all, and I wanted to come before anyone else.
Tony and Nurse lived on the top story. Tony was keeping his hawks, several at a time, in a little shed in the garden, and was continuing his practice of leaving a path of bloody entrails in his wake. From small yellow beaks to gizzards and claws, there was always evidence of fresh kill about the house. Mum and I complained to him about this, to no avail. He supplemented the raptors’ diets with pigeons he had bagged in Trafalgar Square and brought home on the tube.
Tony’s room was off limits, but I usually found a way to get hold of the triangular glass Hennessey bottle in which he stored a wealth of sixpences. It was quite easy to lift a few and shake the bottle to plump up the remaining coins. In Nurse’s wardrobe, on the shelf above the green high heels with the pointy toes I liked to try on, was usually a carton of Player’s or Benson & Hedges cigarettes stowed away, from which I’d help myself to a pack.
When we were first in London, Mum’s closest girlfriends were Joyce Buck and Siân Phillips. They were, as Joan later described them, the three graces of the moment, and together they went antique hunting and out to lunches and parties. The crowd was literary and artistic and theatrical. And Joan and my mother had a special friendship all their own, one that made me jealous on both sides. It was possibly one of my reasons for stealing small but significant objects from both of them.
Mum’s friendship with Giorgy Hayim was still active, but we saw less of him and more of her new friend and sidekick, a young writer called Peter Menegas. Peter was gay, short, and lithe, with a large head and a shock of brown hair. He had a big laugh and loved a social occasion. They had met through a friend of Morris Graves, called Richard Svara. Soon Peter and Mum were hanging out on a daily basis. He rented an apartment nearby and came over in the mornings for coffee. They were writing a musical based on the story of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, called A Girlfriend Is a Girlfriend Is a Girlfriend. New, interesting people were coming to the house on Sundays. On warm summer nights, there was wine and candlelight and music.
But Mum was often away on trips, and I missed her when she was gone. I suspected that she was not traveling alone, and my suspicions were confirmed when I saw a group of snapshots of her looking tanned and relaxed for the camera at the Winter Palace hotel in Luxor, Egypt.
• • •
I had a girlfriend called Michelle at Town and Country. She wore black pencil on the rims of her eyes and knew more about most things than I did. Tony was now at Westminster School in the city as a weekly boarder, Monday to Friday. He did not appear to be making many new friends in London, but he still saw Tim Grimes, with whom he shared an interest in antiques and firearms. He was taking fencing lessons from a Bulgarian ex-champion called George Ganchev, who was going out with Mum’s great friend Gina Medcalf.
I, on the other hand, had plenty of cronies now. Fewer might have served me better, as I was at most times distracted from my lessons and my homework, although I had a morbid streak and liked to write essays. One such effort was entitled “Paris from the Eyes of Death: A Suicide’s Last Look at the City He Loves.” I was tall, already flirtatious, and precocious; I looked several years older than my age. I loved to dance and I wore a lot of makeup. Every morning before school, I’d draw eyeliner twice across each eyelid, on
ce close to the lashes, once in the hollow, and blend pearlized shadow to my cheekbones. I liked to wash my hair every day, and dried it by flipping it over my face in front of a space heater set to high. It took me at least an hour and a half to get ready, making me chronically late for school.
There was an eccentric roster of kids at Town and Country—Anne Rothenstein, who later married the director Stephen Frears; her brother, Julian, with whom I had a good exchange in Victorian Pears soap labels, which we both collected; and Jan Markham, who became an actress. It was there that I really fell in love for the first time: Joshua Thomas was a great dancer and drew beautifully, including an epic pen-and-ink rendering of Napoleon’s retreat from Russia on the walls of the assembly room. He had white-blond hair and navy-blue eyes and a fierce contempt for the bourgeoisie. Although I think he loved Jan more than he did me, when we went to the country one weekend on a school outing, Joshua kissed me between marshmallows by the light of a bonfire.
• • •
The first musical I ever saw in London was My Fair Lady, at the Haymarket, with Nurse. It was far from the pantomimes I’d seen as a little girl back in Ireland. Before the show started, some people behind us were told they had tickets for the wrong night. I remember feeling bad for them. And then the curtain went up on such a lovely spectacle—Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews. I wanted to dance all night when I got home.
What I loved most was to go with Mum to the theater. It is as much through her as through my father that I received the best acting education, watching the art of live performance. She took me to see Lynn Redgrave and Maggie Smith in Much Ado About Nothing and Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud in The School for Scandal, with the great Margaret Rutherford; Robert Stevens in The Royal Hunt of the Sun; Vanessa Redgrave in The Seagull; David Warner in Hamlet. I saw Alvin Ailey and Merce Cunningham, the Red Army Chorus and Dance Ensemble from Georgia, the Harlem Globetrotters, Danny La Rue, Marcel Marceau, Hair, and even one of the last performances of Marlene Dietrich, who sang “Where Have All the Flowers Gone,” appearing onstage as if poured into a sequined mold, in a pool of white light that glanced off her cheekbones and fell at her feet.
A Story Lately Told: Coming of Age in Ireland, London, and New York Page 11
